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Learn more about iView and Receive a Free T-Shirt!
Thank you for your interest in iView and Opticom, the industry leader in the delivery of automated service intelligence.
You can find much more information about iView and how it can help reduce your IT operational costs today
at http://www.getiview.com/promos/nww/jumpnw.jsp?src=WNWA01
We are also very interested in your feedback on this white paper and our break-through technology called e-Service Chain
Management. Give us your feedback by completing our online survey at
http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?HH3LCGV9744HPPCLS5ERKMHD
and get your free iView t-shirt! On Question 8, when specifying your name, add the words "T-Shirt" to get your free
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The importance of the timely deployment of B2B services is simply too significant to ignore. Therefore, management
product support is becoming a question of when versus a question of if for many users. At
the same time, however, the technical requirements for effective B2B management are quite daunting when compared with
those for either traditional enterprise management or even the management of basic Internet access. For one thing, the
very nature of B2B transactions requires both a level of network availability and performance predictability that are
far more similar to those of traditional telephony networks than enterprise or public internets. Furthermore, these
availability and predictability attributes must be supported (and also enforced) by each and every component in the
transport path from the requesting client to the responding server. This holds true regardless of whether private or
public networking services are utilized.
It is this exact problem that existing public and proprietary Quality of Service (QoS) standards are intended to
address. The key objective is to ensure that the path-specific QoS that is committed to by the provider is what is
indeed delivered to the user. This requires combining the ability to effectively manage the supporting components of
specific service flows along with the ability to monitor and manage the service flow itself as a single unified entity.
We refer to this unified service flow as an e-service chain (e-SCM) and its supporting management technology as
e-Service Chain Management. An e-service chain is a service transport flow that can support conversations that range
in complexity from a basic B2C e-transaction to something as complex as a multi-enterprise digital exchange order and
fulfillment handshake. In both cases, the quality of the flow as well as that of the supporting network components
needs to be configured, monitored and adjusted as necessary in order to ensure that subscriber expectations are being
met, if not exceeded.
Panoramic View
Technology Supplier Provider Customer Business Model Purchasing Procurement Systems Supply
Chain Management ERP
Systems Customer
Relationship Management Service Network
Management Systems Network Element
Management Systems Element
This matrix shows the service value chain along the horizontal axis and the various management planes along the vertical
axis. These two dimensions of the matrix clearly allow better understanding of the management requirements. As shown in
the matrix, some of these requirements are fulfilled through various management applications available in the market
today. However, there is a clear gap in the matrix when it comes to managing services from a value chain perspective.
This is a critical gap as it allows the service delivery chain to be measured, improved, planned and controlled from end
to end. That in turn opens the opportunity to integrate with the business management systems thereby allowing a tighter
integration between the customer and the business, making the foundation of a strong business model. Therefore, to gain
a complete and more importantly a cohesive Quality Management View of the service, it needs to be managed across its
value chain. Interestingly enough, the value chain is only as strong as its weakest link in delivery. It then implies
that the management systems managing the service value chain have the ability to interpret, interpolate and interrelate
information across all the linkages of the service value chain. This provides the opportunity for the provider to get
integrated further with the customer, for the customer to get a better visibility into the service delivery process as
well as the service components and for the supplier-provider relationship to be defined from a service delivery point of
view.
What is e-Service Chain
e-Service Chain is:
The iView Solution
Opticom's iView product suite provides service management solutions that are based on managing the e-Service Chain
instances for various types of e-Services. The iView suite of products creates a new category of service management by
adopting a business oriented modeling approach as applied towards service management. It enables the manager to look at
the "states" of services from various business perspectives by integrating & correlating metrics across multiple planes
of service management to produce coherent business impact metrics. The innovative approaches in iView allow a manager
to:
The iView solution has some unique capabilities that allow it to not only provide a compelling value proposition but
also create a new category of management through sheer innovative "outside the box" approach to service management.
These capabilities can be broken down into the following categories:
iView Service State Model - SSM
iView allows for specification of a model for a service, specify the metrics that are collected from the components and
the formulas to combine the metrics for various types of management data related to availability, utilization or
response time. It also includes interfaces for manual entry of administrative information and methods to correct bad or
missing data. The model synthesizes the information to provide a smaller set of data that maps to the service. The
system also provides a mechanism to view and share the management information and computed metrics among multiple users.
The model of a service in iView is represented as an instance of the e-Service Chain. By modeling individual
participants of the chain as they apply to a given service instance allows iView to create unique instances of
individual services. Each service is modeled along with the necessary relationships between various components that make
up the service, the agreed upon component contributions for defining the terms of the service level agreement and the
customer who is consuming the service. Concurrently, iView also attaches a "STATE" with each service chain model, which
provides a deterministic view about the impact of any individual linkage and its attributes on the overall service at
any instant. For example, if the service being modeled is a SAP service which is delivered over a T-1 link which uses an
ATM-PVC as the underlying transport link and is being provisioned over an ATM switch from vendor X, then the service
state model allows monitoring of the responsiveness of SAP client and server in conjunction with the monitoring of the
cell transfer rate through the PVC as well as availability of the switch and their individual impacts on the overall SAP
service availability at any instance. The SSM approach also allows a user to change the context of management view by
switching to any of the linkages in the service chain. In the previous example, it allows a user to see which customers
got affected if the switch was unavailable or for a given service, what are the components supporting SAP or if the SAP
response time deteriorates, whether the congestion is on the client side or the server and more importantly the cause of
congestion. Whether congestion is due to the server CPU being 100% utilized versus client disk being 99% full or the
ATM-PVC is experiencing a cell loss due to the unavailability of the switch itself thus manifesting itself in a slower
SAP response time.
iView Modeling
iView architecture provides for a very powerful modeling scheme to create models and relationships between models. The
modeling hierarchy in iView is shown in the diagram above. At the top is the model for a customer. This model allows
customers to be defined as a collection of one or more groups of users who are end consumers of the service. The
customer has a name and attributes that signify the associated business demographics. The modeling scheme allows a
hierarchical naming convention for customers such that multiple levels of business demographics can be associated with a
single customer model. For example, if the customer of a service is an enterprise (e.g., Acme Corp) and one or more of
its business units are being serviced, the modeling hierarchy may look like:
Customer Acme_Corp
This allows the provider of a service to create customer models, which mimic the business view. Each customer model can
also have one or more user group models associated with it. A user group signifies the end-user(s) of the service. Those
who will be impacted should the service experience an outage. Each user group keeps a count of how many users are
subscribing to the service. This allows for correlation of a service outage to some level of customer impact.
Many customers' businesses are totally dependent on the services they acquire from others. Beyond visibility into those
services, they need assurances of the level of service they are paying for. They will measure that level of service to
improve the quality of their business delivery. These assurances are Service Level Agreements (SLA). Customer's combine
the services they receive from their providers into higher-level service offerings and they need to resolve and optimize
their overall service models as much as the providers need to optimize theirs. The SLA provides a simple conceptual
interface for measuring the delivery of a service. Rather than dealing with all the components underlying a service, it
provides a simplified interface for both measurement and communication. If both the customer and the provider have
monitored the SLA, then discussions about the service are in terms of the SLA and not in terms of the underlying
components that make up that service. One positive feature of an SLA is that if it is well defined, measured, and
communicated, it allows the service provider to maintain an opaque service on the internal details of how the service is
delivered.
There is a dire need for some degree of opaqueness in the delivery of services to be able to deliver the best service at
the lowest cost point. But if you don't provide visibility via SLAs, you may have no other alternative but to provide
visibility to the components of the service. Providing customer visibility via SLAs can be a positive way to keep them
from trying to force full and total disclosure of how you provide a service.
iView provides the mechanism to capture SLAs as models thus allowing for the modeling of the service itself as an
interface model between the provider and the customer. A service model thus has several attributes such as the customers
it serves, the SLA attributes that define its expected behavior such as times of operation, availability expected,
dependency rules between its components, cost of downtime in terms of impacted users, etc.
The service model and customer model(s) are associated via a relationship layer, which allows the service information to
be exchanged between the provider and the customer(s). This layer further allows integration of iView with the
incumbent CRM systems from a service management point of view.
The Service is further associated downstream with its components via the component models. A component model represents
one or more instances of a type of component. Categories of components include network devices, network hosts, network
servers, transactions representing an e-Application like SAP or Oracle DB, transmission facilities such as leased lines,
links, circuits and non-transmission facilities such as computing and storage resources. A component model is also
assigned a vendor attribute, which allows it to be associated with a given supplier along the e-Service Chain.
Furthermore, component models are also classified by their supplier product family/type. This allows for indexing
components' management information from any of these classification angles. The iView component model is also attached a
globally unique scope identifier to allow multiple models of similar categories or types.
To define what attributes of the components define the contributing factors towards a service, iView allows the
following data attributes to be associated with the component models:
The component models information and their contributions towards service quality can be shared between the provider and
the component suppliers via a layer that allows iView to integrate with incumbent SCM systems. iView pushes the state
of the art by allowing a value added service to include another service as a component model as well as create service
policies. When there are services that have a great deal in common and few variations based upon deterministic tests, it
is more productive to define them as a meta-service and expand it into a family of service model definitions that share
a common set of model definitions with sets of variant attribute definitions based upon an algorithm or SLA/business
rule. Such a capability enables the provider to create multiple instances of a service faster and with minimal overhead
cost. This reduces the delivery time, lead time as well as operating costs of service activation.
Such a sophisticated modeling scheme allows iView to create models for e-Service Chain instances and measure the
contributions of the various chain linkages towards the quality of the service represented by the chain. Scalability of
such a model is a key attribute which when exercised, allows this service management model to be applied across
large-scale multi-vendor networks. Since the e-Service Chain Management TM model allows multiple providers of services
to swap roles as suppliers-providers-customers, the iView solution can also be applied towards providing management
information across multiple providers as well.
iView Data Mining and Metrics Generation
As we discussed the component models and their data sets, it is important to understand that iView provides a unique
capability to automate and customize the component model generation. This capability comes from the data mining
technology that iView uses to capture component model attributes, classification rules applied and the attributes
defined for a given component data set. The technology allows users to create component models based on the element
management systems being used to manage these components from an infrastructure point of view. iView allows adoption of
the semantics used in the incumbent infrastructure management systems to refer to components and to assign service
contribution measurement attributes. A huge benefit of this mining capability is the production of a homogeneous model
of components and their attributes regardless of the incumbent component management system.
Services are much more than a collection of network hardware and servers. Service components also include Databases,
Browsers, Web Servers, Web pages, Custom Application software, phone banks, service agents and monitoring systems.
However, to date, there is no agreement in service management arena to define a dominant standard for access to data
that is needed for service management. So a service management system has to adapt to many differing ways to mine
component management data to produce service management metrics.
At the time of creation of the service model, the SLA attributes chosen along with the dependency rules between
components set the basis for the metrics that will be computed to measure service availability. Depending on the rules
chosen, one or more data sets for component(s) are chosen, sample sets collected and then analyzed to produce business
metrics that indicate the quality of the service being delivered. The iView system contains a vast number of default
metrics and also comes with a kit that allows rules to be added, removed or modified for a given service model.
iView Service Outage Cause Analysis
Network Management System vendors have spent decades pioneering systems that provided a wide base for collecting data
from network elements and presenting it for the use of network experts in analyzing networks and resolving problems.
Most of the work went into collecting the data and presenting it for manual analysis. Very little work has gone into
automating the analysis of that data and reducing it to a few cogent metrics. In its finest hour, this is what iView is
about. It is converting all that raw information into a few metrics about how well a service is performing and when it
isn't, what are the components that are the root problem. For example, if we have 1000 circuits, we don't want to be
buried in data about them to find out what is causing a server to back up. Especially when the problem is the server is
running at 99.995% disk utilization. This requires a management system to have the ability to cross-correlate data sets
to produce more cogent metrics. The service manager needs to recognize the service problem and zoom in on the root cause
out of all the symptoms that exist at that time. Using the cross data set correlation capability, the data mining
technology as well as the service chain modeling techniques, iView is able is able to synthesize service outages from
one or more outages of the components of a service to isolate service root causes to pin point the real outage cause
iView Metric Dissemination Model
The iView system allows the service management metrics to be shared as well as integrated with other business management
systems. The dissemination scheme allows control over who, what, when and how aspects of the information. Thus the
information can be shared across any of the linkage participants of the e-Service Chain. In addition, the ability of
iView to provide this information at each linkage interface allows it to integrate seamlessly with the incumbent CRM and
SCM systems thereby bridging the gap between traditional business management and service management systems.
iView Benefits to the Enterprise
iView Benefits to the xSP
Conclusions
iView for e-Service Chain Management is an innovative service management system that integrates traditional concepts of
Supply Chain Management and Customer Relationship Management as applied to e-Services businesses. The net result is an
effective end-end management across the e-Service Chain via structured methodical approach to managing every link in the
chain effectively. This creates the unique ability to support basic service chain management functionality along with
the ability to monitor and measure e-service quality contribution by technology, vendor, vendor product, service
provider and service.
iView advances the state of the art by not only managing the traditional what's of service quality, but also the who,
why, when, where and how much considerations as well. As such, it offers a unique approach to providers of services
that are simultaneously tasked with maximizing service quality as well as operational excellence.
For More Information
For more information about iView and a FREE Interactive iView CD-ROM, visit
http://www.getiview.com/promos/nww/jumpnw.jsp?src=WNWA01
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